New book POSTMORTEMS

My new book Postmortems is now available at various booksellers. The print edition ships on the 26th. Various sites may have the ebook already, some may not just yet.

This is the first volume of a projected three that gather together many of the essays and writings that I have been sharing on this blog over the last several decades. This book focuses specifically on games I have worked on, from LegendMUD up through social games, and is a book of design history, lessons learned, and anecdotes. Richard Garriott was kind enough to write a foreword for the book.

It’s not a memoir or tell-all; the focus is on game design and game history. There’s still nowhere near enough material out there in print covering things like the history and evolution of online worlds (MUDs especially), in-depth dives into decisions made in games by the people who made them, and detailed breakdowns of how they worked. So I hope that this will be useful to scholars and designers, and that players might find it a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes. Just don’t expect salacious stories and secrets.

Those of you who have been reading the blog for a while will find much in there that is familiar; if you have ever wanted the SWG postmortem series in book form, here it is in expanded form. If you have ever wished that the various articles on the UO design were gathered together, here they are, along with new chapters covering things like all the things we tried doing to curb excessive playerkilling. If you ever wondered what happened with Metaplace, this is how you find out, as there’s a new and extensive postmortem. Many blog commenters make cameos in footnotes.

The contents:

• Early Days, which covers my apprenticeship creating board games as a kid, and the lessons I learned that way.
• MUDs, which has design articles about DikuMUDs, design and administrative practices material on LegendMUD, a lengthy article on the struggles with MUD governance that we went through back then, and even samples from what MUDding was like (for the younger folks out there!).
• Ultima Online, including the resource system, playerkilling, the evolution of the game economy model, “A Story About a Tree” and the aftermath, and more.
• Star Wars Galaxies, including the whole postmortem series, a new overall design overview, and even materials I wrote to the players explaining our design philosophy. Oh, and of course, a new piece on the NGE.
• Transitions, a section on the way in which MMOs changed and the impact they left on players over the course of the 2000s.
• Andean Bird, the little art game I made back in the mid-2000s, with design diary and a transcript of the popular “Influences” speech that resulted.
• Metaplace, which hopefully answers the lingering question “what was it?” once and for all, and covers not only the tech architecture but also has a frank postmortem of why it didn’t work. I also go into the social games we made afterwards, with some special love for My Vineyard.

I’m sharing snippets from the text on Twitter all month. Here’s some of the samples so far:

I could use your help. Please make noise about the book online. Once you read it, please leave a review on Amazon (or wherever you buy it) — book featuring is dependent on there being a certain number of reviews there. Talk about the book on social media sites and let interested folks know it exists. I took time off from actually earning a living in order to make this happen, because I think documenting this history is important.

It was also eye-opening to go back through all this history. Many of of the lessons in these older articles are more relevant than ever, honestly, as the whole world gets swallowed up into a vast virtual world. I’d love for those lessons to get shared widely.